"The Prestige," the latest from Christopher Nolan ("Memento"), is a flat story about a rivalry between two magicians in turn-of-the-century London. Like "The Illusionist," also dealing with magic and set in the same era, it presents a double cat-and-mouse game -- one between the main characters and the other between the filmmaker and his audience. Nolan's fascination with magic and with tricks in general comes through without question, but he approaches the subject with a seriousness that soon turns grim.

Once the grimness descends, it never lifts. It doesn't get a lift from its central characters, who, despite being played by charismatic leading men (Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale), remain neither appealing nor compelling. Neither does the story provide much interest. The film is devised as a kind of magic trick, but here we see the trick coming from about an hour away.

The obscure title derives from the name magicians give to a trick's third and final stage. (For example: A man, made to disappear, is then made to reappear.) The "prestige" is where the shock, surprise and magic happens, and so the implicit promise is that the movie -- based on the novel of the same name by Christopher Priest -- will have the same effect. It doesn't.

Jackman is Angier and Bale is Borden, two aspiring magicians who begin their career as flunkies for a master magician (played by real-life master Ricky Jay). Angier cuts a good figure and has an engaging stage presence, while Borden has no personal appeal at all. He's a creep, onstage and off. But he has a gift for creating magic tricks that far exceeds anything Angier can imagine.

The two men start out as pals, and then something happens -- something bad -- and they become enemies, equally matched in that they each possess advantages that the other doesn't have. Their rivalry is not merely professional but also personal. Each, without quite admitting it or perhaps even knowing it, is intent on the other's destruction.

Such a setup should have been enough to fuel 100 minutes of drama (maybe even 130), but the film remains a cold exercise. Neither man relishes the idea of destroying the other -- at least not enough to be fun about it. Borden is a cold introvert, whose emotions are hidden, and so the movie follows Angier, who is more recognizably human. But a peculiar situation develops. Though we're focused on Angier and his earnest quest to find the greatest trick ever devised, it begins to become ... not clear, nothing's clear ... but rather just possible that the cold, obnoxious Borden may be ever so slightly more in the right than Angier.

Thus, we find ourselves watching an ice-cold movie about competition that contains not a shred of rooting interest. There's not much in the way of romance either, despite the presence of Scarlett Johansson as the lovely Olivia, who is a kind of "magician hag." Olivia doesn't really care which magician she's in bed with. She likes anything in a top hat, and if a guy has birds in his pockets, all the better. Johansson is a good actress, but anything before the 1920s seems too much of a stretch for her. Her consciousness, at least for the time being, registers as very post-World War I -- that is, modern, as in our era, which began around 1920.

David Bowie appears as the Serbian American scientist Nikola Tesla. But aside from the initial kick of "Hey, there's David Bowie," he might be any actor stuck in a role that could have ended up on the cutting-room floor without anybody missing him.